Posted
by
Unknown Lamer
on Wednesday September 28, 2011 @03:29PM
from the time-to-upgrade-that-voodoo3 dept.

jones_supa writes "It turns out that you can still get a legacy PCI graphics card with a modern GPU. In this case it's a Nvidia Geforce GT 520 card provided by Zotac. Both the PCI and PCIe x1 variants feature a GT 520 graphics chip with 48 stream processors, 512MB of DDR3 memory, a 810MHz core clock speed, a 1333MHz memory speed, and a 64-bit memory interface."

I want a recent-generation video card which works well with classic 8-bit ISA bus. I have at least one IBM XT-class machine I want to run Starcraft II on.

Bah... you kids with your newfangled PCs and all that nonsense! I want a card that fits in my Altair's S100 bus [wikipedia.org], you insensitive clods!

I too would like to give Starcraft II a go once I get that card working, but I understand the game has high-end requirements that may require other upgrades to my Altair, such as a keyboard, a mouse and some form of display more sophisticated than the LEDs on the front panel.

The nice thing about PCI is that quite a few computers, old or contemporary, still have a fair number of PCI slots. With one or two truly esoteric exceptions, AGP was one slot only. You can never have too many video outs...

Also, cards like these often have a lot of media playback capabilities that aren't bandwidth-hungry. This could likely, for example, allow an old clunker system to be upgraded to Blu-Ray capabilities fairly cheaply.

Due to the nature of PCI Express, it's actually easier for manufacturers to make PCI cards than AGP cards nowadays.

Also, cards like these often have a lot of media playback capabilities that aren't bandwidth-hungry. This could likely, for example, allow an old clunker system to be upgraded to Blu-Ray capabilities fairly cheaply.

GT520 should run VDPAU acceleration pretty well... It takes practically zero CPU power to shovel bits at the video card. This means practically any old box out there is an instant HDMI output mythtv frontend. Obviously I haven't tried it, but it should work fantastic.

Yep, this is exactly what my MythTV HTPC does, only using an older PCI card.

It takes practically zero CPU power to shovel bits

Case in point, my aforementioned HTPC is a Celeron (yes, a humble Celery) and plays all ATSC content (720p, 1080i) just fine.

VDPAU rocks. PCI does the job.

PCI is 133 MB/s. Shoveling 1080i60 to the GPU requires ~178 MB/s. Shoveling 720p30 to the GPU might work, as that only requires 79MB/s, but unless VDPAU does the entire process on the hardware (that is, you send nothing but the encoded stream to the videocard, and it handles the entire decode process end-to-end, including the scaling and overlay output), you're going to need at least two copies, so 720p is out too; PCI was half-duplex. I believe subtitles would require this sort of double-copy, even if VDPA

Yes, but sometimes it's nice to be able to stuff in another video card or three and get yourself a second monitor or some extra CUDA processing.... without having to completely replace your motherboard. If nothing else, it'll probably run cooler than an older PCI-based video card.

If the form factor is correct, then plenty of recent Xeon/Opteron servers, with a free PCI slot, suddenly become AWESOME desktop platforms.
Around here, you can get late model 4-core Xeons, with maybe 8GB of RAM, on Craigslist, from name-brand companies [HP, Dell, etc], for circa $500.
And they will be of VASTLY higher quality [with esp. vastly better motherboards] than the consumer-oriented junk that those same companies are peddling.

There are an awful lot of PCI slots in all sorts of embedded systems out there, and some of them may be looking for a graphics upgrade. For that matter, I still have instruments that have EISA slots in them. I suspect I'll be running them for another decade. 10Base2 is getting to be a pain to deal with, though.

There are a lot of Core2 era Xeon servers with PCI/PCI-X slots, including a lot of pedestal servers which are designed to be used in an office environment. We use HP ML series for most of our remote offices where we don't have room for a dedicated rack. The biggest obstacle to using one as a workstation (other than the large size) is the fact that you generally can't just slap a new SATA drive in there, you need a carrier and on many systems the RAID card will only recognize certain drives.

It depends on what you do. Bitcoin mining with a Radeon HD5870 is not noticeably slower when it is on a PCI slot adapter, compared to PCIe x16. Many people use PCIe x1 slots for mining, to make use of all available slots, and for easier use of extension cables.

At this point it is hard to imagine that you're even recovering the cost of power with Bitcoin mining. Isn't it down in the low single digits vs. the US$ on the Magic the Gathering exchange? And the complexity is so high that you just get a dribble of coins out of even a high end farm anymore. The only time mining made sense was a couple of years ago when there were still suckers buying the damn things and driving the price up.

Right now, it's far cheaper to buy bitcoins with cash than to pay the power cost to mine them.

I have done my math. Electricity is fairly cheap in Finland, and currently I'm barely making a profit. There is also this idea of long-term investment/involvement, and not everything needs be profitable right now.

If you think bitcoins will be the currency of the future, go spend a few hundred dollars on them.

I already have plenty of BTC saved, after selling some of them to recover my costs (including hardware).

The point of mining is not to make money, but to verify transactions. People who believe in the system should participate in maintaining it. No point in saving some BTC if nobody is running

i gotta 2nd that say you got an old Athlon XP, Pentium 4, even old Celeron that don't have PCI-e, With this card that only uses like 30 watts using hardware video decoder you got a use outta an old PC.

I can't imagine that you're going to be making the most of the hardware somehow.

Depends on what you do with it. Consider this article [techpowerup.com] about PCI-Express scaling on a 5780... A lot of games get 75% FPS or above using only a 1x PCIe port compared to a 16x. Keep in mind that the 5870 is a high-end card, and the 520 is a low end, so I don't think the performance hit will be that bad.

I suspect people that would get an upgrade with a 520 don't exactly have powerful machines to start. It is barely better than an integrated GPU. I can see this for PVR boxes as it is more than adequate to play movies. For gaming, look elsewhere.

The real reason to put a new card in an old computer is because manufacturers stop releasing drivers for old cards, and old drivers don't work with recent OSes (this is particularly bad under Linux).

I just ditched a pretty good laptop (Thinkpad T60p) because ATI doesn't support the video card any more, and the generic drivers don't support the features that make it useful to me (DVI output through a docking station in this case).

There are a TON of older computers that people still run with PCI slots. They would work just fine repurposed as a HTPC but until now there was no hardware acceleration available. The XBMC Forums will have someone come along that is looking for the "Best" PCI option and usually that involves either an SVIDEO or VGA connector. Some new TVs will have a VGA but not all of them.

Might as well just get a $50 sandy bridge pentium g620 and a $50 h61 motherboard with HDMI out and be done with it rather then try to keep an obsolete machine running with a silly PCI graphics card that is probably slower than the graphics core built into intel's new cpu's.

Actually, no. The third party chipsets include hardware for better up-scaling and decoding of h.264. Removes a lot of noise and produces a better result, particulartly if you are outputting to something like a TV.

You are absolutely correct. Technically, the GF520 is still considerably more powerful than anything Intel produces, but the Intel part will make up for at least in part with latency and bandwidth. That's besides the point, however, as no one looking to use onboard Intel graphics, or one of these cards, has any care for any meaningful graphical or computational performance. They both run hardware accelerated decoding well enough, and the new system will idle around 1/3rd the power as the old Athlon/P4 co

That benchmark puts the a low end Radeon 5450 at comparable to the best Intel graphics in some tests, and significantly outperforming it in other tests. Meanwhile, this benchmark [techpowerup.com] puts the GF520 at somewhere around 50-100% better performance than the Radeon 5450, depending on the test. So yes, this card is far more powerful than anything Intel offers, but it's moot because no one looking for one of these cards or Intel graphics cares much about graphical performance.

Back when the development branch first added VDPAU support, I got a cheap passively-cooled GeForce 8400GS PCI card and slapped it into an old PIII 600-mHz (overclocked to 733, yeeeaahhhh boyyy!), booting directly into XBMC without any desktop environment. Runs like a charm, outputting 720p over the DVI output fed into the HDMI input on my projector (which is natively 720p, hence no higher res used), the only annoying bit was that at first I was having to compile it from source, which believe me, takes quite

And what are you going to put this in, a PII? That won't help, the bottleneck is the processor (~400 MHz) or some other part of the ancient hardware.

Running VDPAU video card acceleration on a zbox my CPU varies a lot depending on content but it would seem a pentium 75 Might be able to act as a mythtv frontend with this card. I think something in your specified PII era would be far more than enough. Especially since in ye olden days when mythtv was new, a PII was a kinda decent frontend, and its not like TV has changed much since then.

Of course tv has changed since the PII came out, there was no HD back then. NTSC encoded as MPEG2 is simple, playing back 1080p30 content using one of the modern codecs is much, much more difficult, especially if you don't have hardware acceleration (which would be a big reason to add an NVidia card to an older system).

Well, perhaps not a pentium II, but this will help immensely on both AGP era boards (this is much more powerful), and later boards that were too cheap to even include more than a few PCI slots- in fact, I have such a 775 board like that. With vdpau, though, I think this brings HD video into the realm of the Pentium III or even, possibly, the Pentium II. I'll probably buy a few for older machines I work on, hell, this may even allow for compiz.

I'm hoping it's got a bog-standard PCI interface specification, so that the old PWS console firmware works with it. The PWS 600au works great with an ATI Radeon 9000, NetBSD + X11. Not so sure about the xorg support for the GT520 though. We'll see.

Been there, tried that --- this was on an old CATS ARM box. Turns out that there's a lot of ia32 code in ROM on the graphics card which, of course, ARMs and Alphas are totally unable to run.

The CATS box managed to at least initialise the card into text mode by running the graphics card ROM via the world's slowest ia32 emulator; the keyboard lights would flash for ten seconds on bootup and then you'd get the graphics card's POST message. I don't know what Alpha boxes do.

As yet there are but one or two video cards compatible with a Mac Pro1,1 capable of playing Portal, and they are still quite expensive ($400+), no longer manufactured, and vendors are unreliable for (1) shipping the correct card for the model of Mac and (2) don't seem to last very long once they do ship a "working" one (apparently a reflashed PC card). The last one I got eventually decided that it had to drive the display connected to it at exactly the same res

A lot of people don't seem to understand that you don't need a 16x PCI-E slot for graphics cards, or even half that. The cards will rarely ever require that much bandwidth and certainly not under normal gaming conditions.

This card seems to be designed for situations where you want to do things with your PC that isn't bleeding edge gaming. That particular card isn't really that great anyhow. This would be perfect for a multimedia PC, or for casual games.

Yes. The PCIe 1x variant should be particularly useful for up to 8 monitor systems, as systems with 4 PCIe slots are very easy to find. Beyond that you may find getting enough power to them problematic, but it is theoretically achievable.

If you are going to saddle it with a PCI or a single lane PCIe, why do you need a modern GPU? Older technology cards are still available and still supported.

Because the GPU manufacturers actually charge nearly as much for older designs as they do for low-end modern ones. Because the memory for older GPUs is becoming hard to acquire. Because if you're investing large sums of money to design a board for a specialised application that isn't going to sell spectacular numbers, the difference between a $10 GPU and a $15 GPU isn't really going to make a proportionally huge difference to the retail cost of the board, and it might make a difference to whether it's use

Before my X2 died, It was upgraded with a HD3850 and could run pretty much anything, albeit not at highest settings. I'm trying to see what good a PCI card could do besides

A) adding a third monitorB) adding hdmi on the cheap on an HTPC

Systems with PCI slots will either have PCI-E or AGP slots. Those that only have PCI will be in P2 class, and it makes no sense to upgrade that kind of machine with a fast video card, even for folding or mining.

Strictly PCI would be restricted to Pentium and pre-Super7 systems. The Pentium IIs were marketed heavily on the back of AGP, but some forever alone lunatic out there is slapping his hands together, crowing that his quad-processor Pentium Pro box will finally get a "worthy" video card. I almost want to see that.

Right now I have an HTPC sitting at home, based on an Atom chip that worked great (and still does) for pushing SDTV. When the HDTV went in, it was woefully inadequate, what with the embedded Intel graphics that can't push better than about 10fps at 720p.

It's got a single PCI slot for upgrading....

This card is *exactly* what I need to make this thing rock again as a Hi-def HTPC. With HDMI out, I can pump 7.1 surround to the stereo, and this thing should handle up to 1080p video playback without blinking.

I've got two Mini-ATX boards lying around with a fully functional PCI slot. The PCI board is fanless as well, so that might make an interesting media playback device for sure. And it has HDMI. I'm already sold, this baby could hook up my VIA Mini-ITX to my full HD TV (that, unfortunately, does not do VGA in). Happy thoughts. Shame it is not half height, I'll have to saw my wine-box in two:)

The timing is slightly off on that comic. In 1995 you could get a Pentium (with floating point bug!) and 16MB of memory for reasonable (at the time) prices. That Pentium might even have triple digit Mhz! You would also get a double or maybe quad speed CD-ROM and maybe a whole gigabyte of Hard Drive.

The utterly braindamaged DOS memory model was still a problem though. Luckily, that year also saw the release of Windows 95 and the beginning of the end of segmented memory.

I remember these fights and saving the successful config.sys, himem.sys, etc. files to a boot floppy to use just to play that game. Nothing else loaded but the bare essential mouse, keyboard, and video drivers and load those high.

I actually LIKE articles like this, as it gives me info on another option for my customers that are looking to upgrade to Win 7 but whose box doesn't have PCIe. I've found Windows 7 can run quite decently on a 2.2GHz P4 with 2Gb of RAM but there are a hell of a lot of machines out there without PCIe and AGP cards are frankly crazy high now.

I just really wish someone would make some Radeon HD5xxx and 6xxx cards with AGP and make them sub $50 like they did for awhile with the HD2xxx and 3xxx cards. There are a lot of late model P4s that can easily and cheaply be upgraded to the Pentium D (I buy them all day long for less than $20 a chip) which works great even on MMOs like LOTRO and Perfect World but Windows 7 runs so much better and videos are so much smoother with a decent GPU for DXVA. With the economy still nasty having affordable options is always of the good in my book, So I like hearing about stuff like this and don't forget XP is still supported until 2014 so that is a hell of a lot of boxes out there that could run better with a GPU boost.

The problem with ebay is you often are just getting some else's headaches. you may have had better luck but the few times i've tried getting AGP cards from there they had either pushed the card too hard and had damaged the mem or had cooked the GPU or toasted the fan. the few sellers with really high rating where you wouldn't have to worry about that want as much as a new card, so no money saved there.

And that is what it all comes down to, money. which is cheaper, $450-500+ or $175? because $450 is what I a

AGP might have some use, there's still some decent bandwidth there, 2133 MB/s.. But PCI? 133 MB per second? You can't even blit 1024x768 over a PCI bus at 60Hz. That's right, if you try to play 1993's Doom on a GeForce GT 520 over a PCI bus at 1024x768, you will be bandwidth limited below 60FPS. Doom. A game that was released on the Super Nintendo.

As for DXVA? I'm not sure if you've got enough bandwidth... DXVA normally still does some stages of the pipeline in software, which means copying the uncompressed

But carbs are still very useful. Is there really much use in having a modern GPU on a PCI card? For those occasional legacy systems there are plenty of PCI cards floating around for cheap. Heck, I've got a stash of old PCI cards I'd gladly give away.

Probably. And PCIe 1x definitely. There are many GPU applications that do not require high bandwidth to the host processor (i.e. detailed calculations that can be performed with relatively static data sets such as rotating or stepping through static scenes where most of the geometry remains constant, or on the GPGPU side of things performing similar calculations repeatedly, e.g. neural network training). It also allows many-monitor systems on machines that aren't hugely expensive but need latest-generati

You don't seriously imagine that a blu-ray player, or SoC media streamer, has the same general purpose computing capability as a P4 running on an i8xx series chipset (PCI/AGP), do you? I still have two Dell 4550s that are perfectly usable by the kids. Years ago I upgraded them to AGP ATI 3650s because those were rumored to be the last AGP-interface DX9 cards (ATI partners later came ou

The PCI bus can do 133MB/s, half duplex. Your Dell 4550s are AGP 4x, which is 1066MB/s. A wee bit of a difference there. I doubt that you could do even 720p DXVA over the PCI bus, even blitting 720p at 60hz would require 158MB/s. So any device you tried to build with a PCI GPU, no matter how powerful, would probably be limited to standard def.

I've been on the lookout for something like this; not because of the power, but because I have a lot of legacy PC hardware that I want to hook into my HDMI monitor, and the PCI / HDMI eras don't really overlap. This does seem overkill and overpriced for that job though...